One year ago today: June 8, 2014, Russian health food.
Five years ago today: June 8, 2010, who remembers Harry?
Six years ago today: June 8, 2009, fake Elvis copies.
MORNING
If I did not make it clear before, this cottage property I’m looking at does require some TLC. It is not prime real estate, and I don’t want prime real estate. That’s when the house owns you. Here is a photo of the back of the cottage, the side that was not spruced up for the real estate ads. Looks rough, but it is nicer that the place I grew up in. Nonetheless it is a former fishing shack with no heating.
The cottage research took up the morning again. The (much larger) properties on either side are in the $60,000 range, which is good because they keep out the riff-raff. I found the listing price of the neighborhood to be stilted downward because there is a trailer park up the road toward Daytona where the selling price is $30,000. What amused me is the current trend in real estate marketing.
Some tactics include stating the property “isn’t like the others in the area, click here to find out why”. We all love those sites that pop up on every search, like the wow virus that pretends to search. The cottage has been listed for nearly a month and 24 people are watching it. But most of those appear to be unemployed real estate agents. But the daily hits have tumbled from a high of 125 on May 4th to 3 today. And one of those was mine.
This still does not mean somebody won’t buy it before I do. I can’t meet the price. All I have is Wallace’s money. Yes, if he’d had any brains, he could have come and got it long ago. But I assume by now his daughter has repaid him for all the trouble she caused, so he won’t be needing it. I was not prepared to buy until next spring, but I think tomorrow I’ll make the guy a final offer. The point is, I have to finance and he has not responded to that previously.
NOON
“You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. – Albert Einstein. (I wonder if he tried?)
So I bought this month’s Mechanics illustrated. It was with great interest I read their article on the theme “America is building again”. Although they correctly establish that “making things” has changed radically in the past ten years, the article is all about folks with workshops.
This morning was confirmation that the last two generations have not produced any computer geniuses. There have been no breakthroughs, and there is no single definitive source you can go to that completely teaches you how to set up a wireless Internet connection. Fred got a new computer and could not log onto his old Outlook account.
As far as I’m concerned, the problem is Outlook. It’s a virus, too. Don’t believe me? How did it get on your computer? I’ll bet you never asked for it. And try to get rid of it. It’s a virus, all right. And the problem with Millennials is they don’t know the answers either—but they are taught that they do. But the paradox with modern education is that I’ve seen these kids download and install software when they did not have a clue what was going on.
And that is why they are not innovators or problem solvers. They only know how to pass the exams, not how to understand the material. It turns out Fred needed the address of his outgoing e-mail server and there were no directions or people available who knew that information, or even what it was or how to go looking for it. I found it (stmp-mail.outlook.com) but it still would not take by the time Fred had to get ready for work.
I'll leave this clip here for now, but such links ultimately go dead. You should see a video of the mini-planet Ceres. This is where we should have and would have been in outer space in 1980 except for that useless, patronizing “shuttle program”. It's the sort of thing I expected to be watching nearly forty years ago. NASA sucks.
NIGHT
Don’t come near me, I pickled onions last week and that’s what I’ve been snacking on. Onions, garlic, cucumbers, carrots. It’s all part of my fun diet. So I went to the foreign cinema to see “Connection”. Well done, but still a takeoff on “The French Connection”. No government, police force, or society knows more about covert lawlessness than the French. You gotta hand them that.
Otherwise, the movie is a rip-off of “The French Connection”, but done well enough to keep you watching the predictable scenes. The night club, the chem lab, the stool pigeon, the gorgeous wives, and those inevitable murders scenes in public restaurants.
I stopped at the club after while the sun was still shining. Hayley was there, I think she’s the replacement for Heidi as in same shifts and same moves. In her shorty-shorts and those such things which appeal to the general contractors and laborers who drink there. Now there’s a gal that was pretty enough to have anything she wanted now working for $250 per shift in tips. I wonder what the story is with that.
Further, I watch a DARPA presentation. They go on with the usual this or that super-weapon, but seem oblivious that the enemy also watches this material. What’s getting scary is the very drone and robot technology they are revealing constitutes the exact technology the bad guys need for their next round of counter-countermeasures. DARPA’s bragging is tipping off the bad guys what moves to make.
ADDENDUM
Still watching videos of court cases, I came across several that I thought revealing of how distorted American law has become. These were instances where the defendant, who is entitled to the best defense possible, ran up against a court that was not prepared to allow that. The thrust of these documentaries missed that point.
It was all about how the court has such a hard time maintaining control and getting through to some people. Well boo-hoo. Alas, America, the way to accomplish that is not by intimidation. I’ve said before, the courts are so bad that it even matters how you dress up to go there. People are not going to respect that brand of court.
So I particularly admired the people who objected to “doing things the court’s way”. They are on to how the whole system is designed to cower people into unfamiliar—and often illogical—procedures that pretty much guarantee anyone who knows the smoothest moves has an unfair advantage. Facts and truth take a body blow in that atmosphere. Posturing is rarely the best defense possible. Like the punk said when the judge criticized his attitude and clothes, “I came here to talk about the case, not about me.”
Excellent point.
